My House is Better Than Your House

by NADAAA (Contribution by), Nader Tehrani (Editor)

Overview

The house is commonly used as a vehicle to get at larger architectural debates. Such is the case in this book, with a dialogue between Nader Tehrani and Preston Scott Cohen whose collaboration in academia has often resulted in two very different approaches to pedagogy. In this discussion, Tehrani draws from central themes within Cohen’s pedagogy to design a house as a response to the preoccupations that drive many of these debates. Adopting Villa Varoise as the main protagonist, the book draws on many architectures to situate the predicaments behind geometry, typology, and the architectural anomaly, among other things, as productive instruments for a broader cultural discussion on architecture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951541347
Publisher:	ORO Editions
Publication date:	02/08/2022
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

NADAAA is a Boston-based architecture and urban design firm led by principal designer Nader Tehrani. NADAAA is a platform for design investigation at a large scale and with a great geographic reach. NADAAA has evolved over three decades as a practice dedicated to bridging between design disciplines: from landscape to urbanism, architecture to interiors, and industrial design to furniture, with a focus on craft, construction, and digital fabrication.

Nader Tehrani is Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union and Founding Principal of NADAAA. Tehrani’s work has been recognized with notable awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture.

Table of Contents

THE ARBITRARY IS ARCHITECTURE

ROBERT LEVIT

PROLOGUE: A USER'S MANUAL

NADER TEHRANI

MY HOUSE IS BETTER THAN YOUR HOUSE

PRESTON SCOTT COHEN & NADER TEHRANI

POSTSCRIPT: THE WEIGHT OF PREDICAMENT

NADER TEHRANI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & CREDITS

Editorial Reviews

"Dubbed the “Dortoir Familial,” or family dorm, when it won a P/A Award in 2013, the now-completed Villa Varoise in southern France provides flexible accommodations for extended family gatherings that range between five and 22 people. Nader Tehrani of Boston-based NADAAA—working with Paris-based associate architect Bidard & Raissi—designed the 5,300-square-foot house on a sloped site overlooking the Mediterranean." —ARCHITECT, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects

"The art of this book is that it can be enjoyed on several levels. It is a deep dive into the design process and the meticulous execution of one single house, and its surrounding landscape, taken from initial concept and site strategies through drawings, diagrams, models, and construction details.... But the book is also a manifesto—a reminder to all of us that as architects it is “our responsibility to change the status quo . . . to motivate the discipline, and produce not novelty, but innovation.” If you manage that, then the results of the design process just may be “better.”" —Architectural Record

From the Publisher